23.3.09

......give an electric shock to a rat if a psychologist ordered you to. How about cutting it's head off?

In 1924 Carney Landis, a psychologist investigating the relationship between emotions and facial expressions, did just that. In this experiment he made participants feel fear by blindly putting their hand in a bucket of water which contained three frogs. When they became aware of the frogs he gave them an electric shock. He also put fireworks under their chair and set them off unexpectedly to startle them. Landis took photographs of the participants faces to record their emotional expressions. In order to make these expressions clearer he painted lines on their faces. Have a look at the photo below to get an idea of what he was doing.